Making Things Live Again: Reconstruction and Recommitment in the Contemporary Anticolonial Historical Novel

This article examines how contemporary historical fiction reconstructs the anticolonial struggles of the twentieth century as resources for political thought and action in the present. Focusing on Isabella Hammad's The Parisian (2019) and C. A. Davids's How to Be a Revolutionary (2021), it argues that these novels constitute a contemporary form of the ‘anticolonial historical novel’: they return to earlier liberation movements not simply to commemorate them, but to recover the ideas, commitments, and political agency that might remain relevant in a still-colonial present. Drawing on Gary Wilder's concept of ‘temporal solidarity’, the article considers how both novels connect past and present across distinct historical conjunctures. It argues that their critical representations of the failures and contradictions of anticolonial movements do not produce political disillusionment. Rather, by reconstructing revolutionary uncertainty alongside anticipation and commitment, they resist ‘left melancholy’ and encourage readers to understand defeat as a source of strategic knowledge. Through their different formal approaches – Hammad's reconstruction of pre-1948 Palestine and Davids's juxtaposition of struggles across time and space – the novels cultivate an orientation to the ‘possible-impossible’, inviting renewed commitment to the unfinished project of decolonization.